Fielding revealed that she informed Firth of her decision over the phone before the news broke out.

"I did want to tell Colin in person but we were trying to have lunch, and I couldn't really tell him why I was trying to meet him, and he was in a different place," she told Time magazine.

"So I ended up telling him he died on the phone."

She recalled: "I had to ask him if he had someone with him and if he was sitting down. It was like someone actually had died. We had to process it. And I was almost saying, 'I'm so sorry for your loss'."

Speaking about why she decided to kill off Darcy, she explained: "That was absolutely inherent from the start. Pain and confusion and those sorts of things are where the jokes come from. There has to be an integrity to what those jokes mean."

Bridget Jones will have two children in the new book, a girl named Mabel and a boy called Billy.

"His presence is very much there in the book and in the child," Fielding added. "As I told [Colin] his memory will live on and he will rise from the dead rather like Jesus".